Dual Language Bilingual Education as a Pathway to Racial Integration? A Place-Based Analysis of Policy Enactment

ABSTRACT

Across the United States, cities like St. Louis may be perceived as predominantly Black/White and monolingual. In such places, there are often few state resources and expertise driving the new growth of dual language bilingual education (DLBE)—that is, policies and programs that aim to develop students’ bilingualism and biculturalism from an early age. Moreover, research rarely explores how DLBE programs develop within particular racial and political contexts, despite their goals to integrate diverse youth. This study focuses on the city of St. Louis to examine how DLBE policies are enacted within particular localities, especially for children from racially and linguistically minoritized backgrounds. Framed by theories of policy enactment, this analysis is part of three multiyear partnerships focused on language education in St. Louis and two school districts in similar state contexts. We found that DLBE enactment in each school system was shaped by community histories, changing demographics, and local education policies focused on racial desegregation and school choice. While each space created racially integrated schools, their enactment was shrouded by Whiteness, especially the history of magnet schools and (White) parental choice as essential for schools’ development. We conclude that place-based research and communal partnerships must carefully consider the unique factors shaping education reform, to recognize for and by whom new programs are truly created and to work toward more socially just, transformative educational contexts.

Acknowledgments

This project was supported by the generosity of all community participants. We thank everyone involved for their partnership, particularly the educators in these school systems who have worked to create equitable language education for racially and linguistically minoritized youth.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Although we provide racial categories to give readers a sense of each context, we use such terms with trepidation, recognizing that each context included individuals from a wide variety of racial and linguistic backgrounds who may not use these markers to refer to themselves. We have chosen Latinx to refer to the Spanish speakers in our contexts who were from Latin America in an effort to be gender inclusive.

² While we reference the state’s comprehensive data system for these statistics, we do not provide a citation in the reference list for this in order to preserve anonymity of the exact schools in this study.

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded in part by a University of Missouri system Research Board grant, 2015-2016, called School Board Members and Policymaking.

Notes on contributors

Lisa M. Dorner

Lisa M. Dorner is Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis and Director of the Cambio Center at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Her research centers on politics and discourses of bilingual education, educational policy enactment, and immigrant childhoods, especially children’s and families’ integration in “new” spaces.

Jeong-Mi Moon

Jeong-Mi Moon is Postdoctoral Researcher for the Social Science Korea Digital-Based Teaching and Learning Research Team and Adjunct Professor at Jeonbuk National University.

Juan Freire

Juan A. Freire is an Associate Professor in the Department of Teacher Education at Brigham Young University. His research concentrates on equity in dual language bilingual education, including the development of policy and programming, and multicultural/bilingual teacher research.

James Gambrell

James A. Gambrell is Associate Professor in the Department of Teacher Education at the University of Northern Colorado. His research focuses on bilingual education including language policy and planning, bilingual teacher preparation pathways, and classroom practices that engage language minoritized students, families, and communities.

G. Sue Kasun

G. Sue Kasun is Associate Professor of TESOL/Bilingual Education at Georgia State University and Director of its Center for Transnational & Multilingual Education. Her research interests include decolonial approaches to education, particularly bridging understandings in ways of knowing and in transnational ways of being across both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Claudia Cervantes-Soon

Claudia G. Cervantes-Soon is Associate Professor of Bilingual Education at Arizona State University. Her research interests center on critical ethnographic and anticolonial approaches to study the cultural production, pedagogies, identity and agency enacted among historically marginalized communities and youth in bilingual, bicultural, and borderlands contexts.